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As to your comment on what has been said of Margaret Pilcher's work...What is said of her work is that it is a
great help AFTER the Campbells arrived in Pennsylvania. What everyone has
to be warned about is BEFORE they arrived in the colony. I wonder whether
Steve Bevins has taken the material (before Pennsylvania) from the Pilcher
book, as anyone might do had they not been warned.

The reason that I would issue this warning with confidence is that, based
upon those early Campbell generations as outlined by Pilcher, two different
research efforts have been undertaken in Ireland in the past twenty years by
groups of descendants in the USA. A considerable number of people
contributed to pay a researcher. The clear result was to clarify that no
evidence could be turned up in support of any of that early Pilcher
information. That is not surprising since Pilcher herself quotes as a
source for the material she published (about those early Irish and Scottish
generations of that Campbell ancestry) that she got it from an (un-named)
elderly lady. I cannot quote her exactly but that was the essence of her
source. Obviously I have nothing against people as sources, but one can
hardly call that 'documentation' when it is about people who lived well
before their lifetime, and out of any 'oral tradition' context. It was the
best she could do under the circumstances - unless of course she had given
the name and address and relationship of the old lady to the Campbells.

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